Cooking Challenge: Easy Homemade Chicken PotPie

I think the intent of the "Pie" contest was for sweet summer pies, but in late August the weather cooled, and I started craving a savory PotPie. As luck would have it, I came home from work early one night & decided we (not the "Royal We", but the me + Little People- kind of "we") would all make a PotPie together for dinner.

(Check out the super-cute mug & super-cute aprons my MIL made! Adorbs!)

My recipe is based upon one from a favorite cookbook "The Six O'Clock Scramble" by Aviva Goldfarb (which is also a website/subscription meal planning website. Totally worth checking out!). Their recipe calls for pre-made pie crusts, but I decided to make it with crescent rolls pressed out, since that's what we had on hand.

I didn't exactly use a recipe, but my memory of the Scrambler's recipe, so I'm just going to tell you about the way I threw all this together.

Here are most of the ingredients (I didn't think to ~~make this a blog post~~ take the picture until I'd already begun cooking, so it's not totally accurate. I decided against pulling the other frozen food bags out of the trash can. ew. )

To begin:
Key for me: Make sure you have about 45 -50 minutes until you're going to be hungry. It takes a little while to throw this together & cook it up. Otherwise, you end up making a second dinner for everyone to eat while you're cooking the first dinner. Or maybe that's just me.

Preheat the oven per the crescent roll. On our case it was 350
2 packages of crescent rolls, each pressed into a round/squarish shape

Spray a pie pan with cooking spray.
Next lay the rolled & pressed crescent rolls (or pre-made pie crust) in the pie pan
(I rolled them out with a little handy-dandy Pampered Chef roller so I don't have to get out my full-sized rolling pin for projects like this. That tiny roller is a fave of my Little People!)

For the filling, start with the vegetables.
I just use what's on hand. In this case it was a mish-mash of fresh & frozen items.

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 carrots, peeled & cut in 1/2 rounds
the end of a bag of pre-cut onions, approx. 1/4 cup

I wanted the veggies to be the right consistency, so I pan fried up the garlic, onions and carrots in Pam Spray before I put them in the filling. (the flavor is much better this way!)

While the pan frying is doing it's carmelizing magic, start Stirring together the filling ingredients
I let the oldest Little Person open the cans, which he thought was AWESOME. (Isn't this post full of free parenting tips!? You're so lucky!)

one can of chicken
one can of cream of chicken lite
a healthy sprinkling of onion and garlic powder & pepper
a light dash of salt (the canned soup has plenty of sodium for the whole endevour)

Then add the frozen, raw & pan fried vegetables to the bowl.
I used various odds & ends of frozen vegetables

in our case it was
approx. 1 cup of corn frozen in early fall last year

the dregs of a bag of frozen lima beans,
a nice healthy portion of frozen peas

If you're really smart (like me) you'll let your kids dump this stuff into the bowl, so they'll think they "cooked," thereby making them more likely to actually eat the meal being prepared.
And stirring. These Little People really value stirring. My oldest even participated by opening the cans with the can opener. He's pretty tough.

At this point I assessed the consistency of the filling. I wished I had a second can of cream of chicken to add. Alas, like most of my wishes, it remained unfulfilled. Upon some pretty quick thinking, though, I realized I did have some plain yogurt & sour cream in the fridge. So, I added about a 1/2 a cup of one of those to this (I think it was sour cream, but don't quote me - we're not operating in exacts here, right!?) until the consistency seemed right for the filling. And the added bonus of more stirring! for my Little People. And with the ~~yogurt~~ sour cream addition, we thereby increase the ~~health of the dish~~ number of food groups included in the meal.

Next I added the filling to the first pie/crescent roll crust. (I did this unassisted. Some instances you can have TOO much help, you know?)

Then, I debated a bit on exactly HOW unhealthy i was going to make dinner. (When I hear my skinny friend describe the gazpacho dinner she's making, I think "oh, that's why she's skinny. She'd never use 2 packages of crescent rolls for a regular dinner!")
And then I went ahead and added that second set of crescent rolls to the top. (It was for purely asthetic reasons. I have to keep the blogosphere happy, right?)

And here's the final result: